Research Papers

Intro to Threat Operations

By Mike Rothman

Can you really ‘manage’ threats? Is that even a worthwhile goal? And how do you even define a threat? We have seen better descriptions of how adversaries operate by abstracting multiple attacks/threats into a campaign, capturing a set of interrelated attacks with a common mission. A campaign is a better way to think about how you are being attacked than the piecemeal approach of treating every attack as an independent event and defaulting to the traditional threat management cycle: Prevent (good luck!), Detect, Investigate, and Remediate.

Clearly this approach hasn’t worked out well. The industry continues to be largely locked into this negative feedback loop: you are attacked, you respond, you clean up the mess, and you start all over again. We need a different answer. We need to think about Threat Operations.

We are talking about evolving how the industry deals with threats. It’s not just about managing threats any more. We need to build operational process to more effectively handle hostile campaigns. That requires leveraging security data through better analytics, magnifying the impact of the people we have by structuring and streamlining processes, and automating threat remediation wherever possible.

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